Online or web search engines have become indispensible when browsing the World Wide Web. Due to the ever-increasing number and variety of contents on the Internet, web search engines have been developed to retrieve a plethora of information. Also, such search engines are able to target specific types of information. For example, online users can now search location-based information by searching a particular location or business within a particular geographical region. Online users can also target search within categories such as scholarly papers or the like.
These existing search engines typically provide a long list of potential items that are related to the searched query. The list may be displayed in a text format, in a graphical format or a combination of text and graphical format. The results may also be sorted by a determined relevancy score or other criteria. For targeted searches, such as a location or a driving direction between two locations, the search results typically include a map and turn-by-turn descriptions of the drive route.
While the quality of search results are improving, one fundamental limitation remains a hurdle to many search engines. The search results continue to be one dimensional. For example, suppose a user wishes to search for car dealerships close to the user's home location by just type “car dealerships,” current search engines would only provide a list of search results, in text format, showing the most relevant results to the searched terms. To further narrow the search results, the user may revise the search term by entering “car dealerships Seattle,” or select one of the search results from the provided list. The list may either link another web page or an address where the car dealership is located.
These one dimensional results have a number of deficiencies including a lack of ability to expand the scope of the searched terms in a geographical or location dimension and/or in a temporal dimension.